1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to scheduling, and more particularly, to techniques for providing schedules which minimize incurred penalties in the presence of service level agreements (SLAs).
2. Description of Related Art
Consider a help desk or similar environment in which employees and/or other resources respond to dynamically arriving events. A typical environment might consist of a team of employees of a service provider who support an electronic business (e-business) on demand server farm for a variety of customers. The events might be trouble oriented, for example when a server goes down. Alternatively, the events might be demand oriented, for example when a customer requests some new amount of data storage. Each of the events may cause the initiation of a job consisting of multiple tasks.
Assume, as is now becoming popular, that the customers have signed contracts called service level agreements (SLAs) with the service provider. These contracts are designed to enforce a grade of service by stipulating penalties for the provider based on the length of time required to perform the various tasks associated with the events, or perhaps based on the length of time required to perform the entire job. Penalties of this form are commonly structured as non-decreasing step functions of time. These functions are generalizations of the sort of deadline penalties typically studied in scheduling theory. For information on scheduling theory, see J. Blazewicz, K. Ecker, G. Schmidt, and J. Weglarz, Scheduling in Computer and Manufacturing Systems, Springer-Verlag, 1993; E. Coffman, editor, Computer and Job-Shop Scheduling Theory, John Wiley and Sons, 1976; and, M. Pinedo, Scheduling: Thgeory, Algorithms and Systems, Prentice Hall, 1995.
The scheduling problem of assigning tasks to employees and other resources while minimizing the total penalties paid belongs to a class of mathematical problems for which exact solutions are essentially intractable to attain. But the potential savings in penalties possible with a good quality scheduling tool can be quite dramatic as compared with an ad hoc solution. Moreover, the customers will be significantly more satisfied if such a scheduling tool is implemented, because the assignments of tasks in jobs to employees and other resources will be more fair. This will result in greater customer loyalty, an intangible but very real benefit.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to provide an SLA penalty oriented optimizing scheduler which assigns tasks in jobs to personnel and other resources in a help desk or similar environment.